I Set Up Camp in the Offside

You would have hated playing street hockey with me when I was a kid. Especially if you were on my team. I was the guy the other team always asked about a close play. Did the ball cross the invisible but mutually agreed upon line? Did it go over one of the rocks we pretended were immutable goalposts? And I would give my honest opinion, even if it cost my team a goal. The only thing that saved me from being mobbed by my team was that yesterday some of them had been on the other team and had benefited from a call I’d made.

Sure, I’ve learned to hold my tongue a bit – otherwise I never would have been able to play team sports for so many years. But after years of watching fighting and chippy play in hockey get worse and worse, I stopped watching it about twenty years ago. Except for that playoff season when Bill Ranford was the MVP. His sister lived in my residence and I watched the Oilers to watch Ranford to be loyal to her. Living in residence was my only way of being in a tribe back then.

But when I was a kid I watched hockey because I liked the sport and probably out of some sense of tribal loyalty. So the 1972 Canada-Soviet series was a big time for me. In fact, one afternoon, my teacher let me bring my portable black and white TV into the class so we could watch one of the games. (I lived across the street from the school and ran home to get the TV.) But watching bits of the reenactment of the series on CBC I see that moment in time through different eyes. Canada-Russia ’72 doesn’t sugar coat things, to its credit. We see the ugliness on the Canadian side of the benches. But the series still has a ‘Hollywood’ ending with a last-minute victory for the Canadians who somehow manage to snatch victory from an indominatable empire and, more surreptitiously, from a 2006 Olympic drubbing. What timing!

And yet many Canadians respond to these victories and losses as if they themselves are doing the winning and losing. I think Canadians give themselves too much credit, but they do respond much as David Berreby might predict in his book Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind – a book which attempts to put some science into the study of our tribal behaviour.

One thing that emerges from his discussion, though, is that the tribe we identify with depends on our circumstances. For example, most Canadians will respond positively about Canada until you, say, ask an Albertan how the province has been treated by Canada, or go a little deeper and ask a Calgarian about their place in the global economy. Loyalty nests within loyalty. And sometime loyalties compete. Do you stay in Canada where you can’t find a job in your field, or do you move to the nemesis U.S. where you can? Most people who even ask this question already know the answer.

I’m sure there are others who are like me – who define themselves more by what tribes they don’t belong to than by those they do belong to. Henry David Throreau was, in that respect, my kind of guy. In a recent Harper’s article (“The Spirit of Resistence”), Curtis White celebrates that spirit of opposition and independence Thoreau embodies. But I’m not so resentful of the lives others lead as to want to live by myself in a cabin by a pond for a few years.

What I would like, though, is for people to notice their contradictory loyalties. Or to recognize that when the news anchor for either national news broadcast begins a story by saying, “This story may have far reaching effects for Canadians…” he might not be talking to you. I don’t expect anyone to come live with me in a place that is always offside, but I would like it if someone somewhere once in a while said the ball didn’t go where his team wants to believe it did.